We’re making online political ads more transparent

In 2015, the Liberal Democrats were blindsided by their then-coalition partners the Conservatives running a ton of Facebook ads targeting seats they held in the west of England. At the time, there was no ad transparency at all, so it was impossible to know with any reliability what was being said, to whom and how much was being spent to…

Digital campaigning isn’t new at this point, but it’s still newer than most of the electoral law that governs it. We think it’s time that changed. The next government should take a step back and do the work needed to improve the rules for British election campaigns in the digital age. Here’s 10 things they could do: What do you…

With thanks to Fabio Votta, who helps us aggregate party spending on different targeting methods. Here’s the first week of the campaign on Meta, broken down by the amount of money spent on the various targeting methods available to political advertisers. To produce the above chart, we aggregate the amount spent on each targeting method for every known political advertiser…